Thursday, January 16, 2025
Uniondale High School unveiled its new Wellness Center — a quiet, supportive space designed to offer students relief from the pressures of school life — with a ribbon-cutting on Dec. 11. The center, created by the Youth Empowerment Project, is a place to decompress, relax and recharge.
“We all deserve a space to relax, to relieve our stress, to detach from all of our anxieties from each day,” Aariana Osorio, a junior at the high school and one of the project leaders, said, “and that’s why we created this space for the entire student body, and for teachers to create personal relationships with the students, and for students who need help to get that help.”
The project, which took over a year to complete, was a collaborative effort led by a group of dedicated Youth Empowerment Project students. They worked closely with their advisers, Kate Muenkel and Amanda Prescia, and other school staff to transform their vision into reality.
The Wellness Center was funded by a grant from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with no extra costs to taxpayers, according to a news release from the school district. From the beginning, the students focused on creating an environment that would offer comfort and calm to anyone who needed it throughout the school day.
“What you see around you is a space that we worked so hard on,” Varsha Ramrookum, another junior and Youth Empowerment Project member, said. “We took over a year of work, and it’s to help kids be comfortable in this school, because we know a lot of kids don’t feel like they have that safe space.
“This is what we tried to create, and we did it,” Ramrookum added.
The center has comfortable seating, relaxed lighting and a variety of stress-relief tools, including “workbooks, coloring books, activities, sensory stickers and headphones for noise cancellation,” Ramrookum pointed out. Students can use the resources to unwind during their breaks or whenever they feel overwhelmed.
Muenkel and Prescia shared how well they felt the process went, with Muenkel describing it as “seamless.”
“The students came in with an idea, and even with all of their ideas, they still came together,” she said. “It was a lot of collaborating, but positive collaboration.”
Prescia said it was “amazing” to see everything come together in the end, and how all the students “lit up” seeing the results of their hard work.
“Actually walking into it, with the carpet and everything that they envisioned, it was just a really great feeling,” she said.
The Youth Empowerment Project students reflected on the time and effort it took to create the space. Junior Andrew Madrid recalled spending many hours working on the room, even staying until late at night a few times to bring it all together.
“It definitely took a lot of planning and hard work, and we definitely spent a lot of time together as a group,” Madrid said. “This is definitely a dream come true, because I know that as a student, I feel stressed most of the time, and it feels really good knowing that I can come to school and if I need a break, I know where I can come.”
The Wellness Center is a much-needed resource for many students, and they expressed their appreciation for the new space. “I think it’s going to be a great place to come and relax,” junior Jasmine Rubio said.
The ribbon-cutting ceremony last week brought together students and staff to celebrate the new addition.
“Today is really special, because it’s all about the children and what they created,” Shawn Brown, principal of the high school, said at the ceremony. “They created a safe space for their peers. They created a place for people to go to when they need a little quiet time, and they deserve a round of applause.”
